Schedule

Date Content Reading Slides
3/31 - 4/2 Welcome/Overview; Maximum likelihood estimation Probability review: Murphy 2.1-2.4, 2.6, 2.8, 3.1-3.2
Statistics review, maximum likelihood: Murphy 4.2
Slides, Annotated slides
Supervised learning: linear models
4/2 - 4/4 Linear regression Linear algebra review: Murphy 7.1-7.3
Matrix calculus review: Murphy 7.8
Maximum likelihood regression: Murphy 4.2
Linear regression: Murphy 11-11.2
Slides, Annotated slides, Linear regression colab, diabetes.txt
4/7 - 4/9 Linear regression with basis functions; Cross-validation Maximum likelihood regression: Murphy 4.2
Linear regression: Murphy 11-11.2
Slides, Annotated slides, Polynomial regression colab
4/9 - 4/11 Bias-variance trade-off Bias-variance trade-off: Murphy 4.7.6
Slides, Annotated slides, Bias / variance colab
4/14 - 4/18 Regularization and sparsity, LASSO Ridge regression: Murphy 11.3-11.4
Lasso regression: Murphy 11.4
Slides, Annotated slides, Ridge and Lasso colab, house_train_kaggle.csv
4/18 - 4/23 Gradient descent Gradient descent: Murphy 8-8.2.1
Slides, Annotated slides
4/23 - 4/28 Convexity; Gradient descent analysis; Stochastic gradient descent Stochastic gradient descent: Murphy 8.4-8.4.4
Slides, Annotated slides
4/28 - 4/30 Classification; Logistic regression Logistic regression: Murphy 10-10.2.4, 10.3-10.3.3
Slides, Annotated slides Classification and Logistic Regression colab
Fri 5/2 Midterm See Exams Page.
5/5 Classification 2; prediction pitfalls Logistic regression: Murphy 10-10.2.4, 10.3-10.3.3
Slides, Annotated slides
Supervised learning: non-linear models
5/7 - 5/9 Bootstrap; Kernel methods Bootstrap: Efron and Hastie 10.2, 11-11.2
Kernels: Bishop 6-6.2, Murphy 17, 17.1, 17.3.4, 17.3.9
Slides, Annotated slides
5/9 - 5/12 Neural networks Neural Networks : Murphy 13-13.4.3
Slides, Annotated slides
5/14 - 5/16 Non-parametric methods; Nearest neighbors Nearest neighbors: Murphy 16.1 Slides, Annotated slides
5/16 - 5/19 More non-parametric methods; Tree-based Trees, Random Forrests: Murphy 18
Gradient Boosting Trees: Murphy 18
Slides, Annotated slides
Unsupervised learning
5/21 - 5/23 Principal component analysis (PCA) PCA, Singular value decomposition: Murphy 20.1
Kernel PCA: Murphy 20.4.6
Slides, Annotated slides
5/23 - 5/28 Singular value decomposition (SVD); more matrix decompositions; autoencoders Autoencoders: Murphy 20.3, 22.1
Slides, Annotated slides
5/30 - 6/2 K-means; Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) K-means, GMM: Murphy 21.3-21.5 Slides, Annotated slides
Modern machine learning (Advanced Topics)
6/4 Multi-armed bandits (Leo Maynard-Zhang) Multi-armed bandits: Bandit Algorithms textbook, Jamieson informal notes
Linear bandits: linear bandits paper, generalized linear bandits paper, pure exploration/BAI paper
Contextual bandits: contextual bandits survey paper
Slides,
6/6 Reinforcement Learning for training Large Language Models Suggested readings for more info (not required): Reinforcement Learning (RL): Sutton and Barto textbook, OpenAI's spinning up
Large Language Models (LLMs): original transformer paper, visual explanation, wikipedia on LLMs
RL for LLMs: KL-control, reward model, InstructGPT paper (ChatGPT), recent DeepSeek R1 paper
Slides, Youtube version